


of love and razor blades your blood is surging

by AssyEr



Series: Soulmates But Mech Flavored [2]
Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Gen, Gun Violence, Killing, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Suicide, Unhealthy Relationships, and people are not nice, but i only have 24 hours no time for regrets, i might have aimed too high, jonny didnt see good soulmates figures around him lads, jonny relationship with jack is probably a warning on its own, no beta we die like men, those happens later as i try to go to sleep, what else
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:47:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25759825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AssyEr/pseuds/AssyEr
Summary: About Jonny and his relationship with soulmarks as he grows up.
Relationships: Jonny d'Ville & One-Eyed Jack
Series: Soulmates But Mech Flavored [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1867225
Comments: 10
Kudos: 65
Collections: Writer's Month 2020





	of love and razor blades your blood is surging

**Author's Note:**

> For the writer's month prompt: ocean  
> you will never guess what happenede  
> (clue: it got out of hands. It was supposed to be about Jonny's mum dammit. So, have punk jonny vangelis instead)

Jonny remembers the first time he heard about the ocean.

He doesn’t think he could have been older than seven. His mother, angry that he kept getting into fights with the other kids, had decided that he should learn to stay quiet, to do something useful with his hands (she wanted to believe that he could do something else with them than violence, that there was still time).

And so she had taken one of the kitchen’s chairs, and sat him down next to her in the table of the workshop.

She taught him to sew. Or at least she tried. He learned the knots and needlework fine, he could be a clever boy when he wanted. But he also got bored easily, and had problems staying focused for a long time. As if he had ants on the ass, his father would say.

Jonny seemed to be doing well, then, and so she had focused instead on her own task (a dress for some beautiful girl, the work that would put food on the table). That’s why she got surprised at hearing him talk.

“What’s tha’?” he asked her, needle forgotten. Again.

By now she already knew that it would be impossible to get him back on sewing without answering his question. “What’s what?”

He pointed at her arm. “Your mark. What’s it?”

Looking at where he was pointing, she realized that her sleeves had been rolled up during her labor, and the mark was visible. She blushed, getting it back down again. It’s not that it was wrong to have it free to view, but she had gotten used to have it always covered. She didn’t like to see the figure anymore.

But her son was insistent. “Ma,” he complained at not getting an answer.

There was no harm in telling him, was there? She looked over at her son, all big eyes and a stare way too angry for someone his size. He had his lips pressed in firm resolve, and was now sitting straight, sticking out his chest in an attempt to be taken more seriously.

“It’s a wave” she told him with a hidden smile.

His curiosity did not relent. “And what’s tha’?”

Only then she realized that he had no way of knowing. He probably didn’t even know what an ocean was, with them living in the dry town since before he had been born.

If her parents could see her.

“D’ you know what an ocean is, son?” she didn’t wait for him to shake his head. “It’s like a very big lake” he still seemed confused. She chastised herself; there weren’t many lakes around here either. “It’s like a puddle. The biggest puddle in the world, and very deep too. So deep no one knows how far down it goes”

He got angry again, believing she was lying at him. “That’s impossible” he accused.

“No it’s not.” Her tone left no room for discussion. He leaned back on his chair, arms crossed, deciding to _perhaps_ believe her. “There are whales, and sharks inside the ocean.” When she was his age she had loved those big creatures, and would often beg her mother for stories from when she went to the sea and crossed path with them. She knew now that most of those were made up, but that didn’t change the fondness she still kept. “Do you know what they are?”

He shook his head, now more interested.

His mother told him. She taught him about whales, and dolphins, and fishes. And about waves, the different shapes and strength with which they would strike the shore, sometimes kind, sometimes devastating. She told him about brave people who would dance on them, with tables cut of wood and nothing else. And when he seemed to grow bored of it, she explained the sea storms, the most dangerous of all things that you could find in the middle of the ocean, along with pirates.

Or course that’s the part he focused on.

Her work long since forgotten, she spent the whole evening explaining pirates to him, and retelling the stories she had heard on her youth. He laughed when she made the voices, and so did she.

Jonny had never seen her mother so happy before.

“Why‘d you leave?” he asked, because he was a noisy kid who would refuse to ever learn manners.

The smile on her face faded, and he wished he had remained silent.

“Things happened,” she said in a flat tone, stroking her arm with the other hand. She sighed, and realized just how much time they had spent talking. It was almost dinner time, she needed to finish sewing the dress for tomorrow morning and Jonny had done almost nothing of what she had planned for him. “Go back to sewing, Jonny” she ordered him, and went back to her labor.

He did as he was told, finding the repetitive task easier now that he had pirates and waves and ships to think about.

There is a game that most kids in the putrid town of New Texas Jonny lives in play, called chicken.

The rules are very simple. Two players will walk as far away from each other as the space allowed, turn around and run at maximum speed to the place their opponent was in. Both would run in a straight line, and the first to get out of the way would be the loser, the chicken.

There were only three outcomes: one of them moved, and carried the shame of being the chicken, both of them moved, and the shame would be double for each, or neither gave in and they both crashed on the floor.

Contrary to popular belief, kids hardly smashed each other (in fact, it was more common that both of them ended chickening out). There was something that happened in the line, as the players got closer and closer to each other, in the moment they looked up and saw the other’s eyes, head already full of doubt.

It’s not that one managed to hide the feeling of the fear they felt away from the other (have you ever crashed against someone at full speed? It hurt, a lot) because they were yet too young to learn to hide their feelings in something as big as The Line. No, they both looked up and saw fear in the other’s eyes.

No one knew really what it was that settled in that short amount of time who would keep pushing and who would give in. Most believed that it was something instinctive, a remaining of a more savage world. Others, that it was just human nature.

Jonny never liked that game. Never played it, in fact. He would scoff at the other children that dared him to go, and get into fights when they inevitably called him coward. It was fine, because he didn’t need those fuckers. He was perfectly fine on his own.

“Goddamit, Jonny” she exclaimed while dragging him inside by the arm. “Can’t you just stay put for one day?”

He shook his arm, trying to get free, but the grip of his mother was too strong for his noodle arms.

“He started it!” he shouted at her, angry. He had told him to stop, to leave him alone! He had been defending himself, he shouldn’t be the one getting in trouble.

Michael had been over him the whole month, and he had told him to stop, to fuck off (when no adults were near, of course). They had been good friends, but then he said that he didn’t want to play with him anymore, and then that he wanted to keep playing, and then asking to see his mark.

He didn’t like showing people his mark. His mum never showed it to anyone, even though she was married. It felt weird, and gross, and he wasn’t doing anything he didn’t want to! (Except if his parents were near, in which case he had to do it).

But he had kept asking him, and following and screaming, and he had wanted to be left alone. He didn’t remember that much of what happened then, but he had pushed Michael, and Michael pushed back. Jonny punched him.

Jonny was a very small child, and Michael was the biggest of the class. The teacher had to get him out from above Jonny, and their parents had been called.

“The teacher said that you started it” she made him sit on a chair next to the table.

The kid stomped his feet against the wooden floor. “He was annoying me! He wanted to see my mark, and I told him to leave me alone, and he kept at it!”

“And you what, just punched him!” it was not a question. She started pacing around, infuriated. She loved Jonny, but he was too much sometimes. “You should have just showed it to him! Or what? Do you have something to be ashamed of?”

“I didn’t want to show it to him!” He didn’t felt like being sat down, too restless. He got up from the chair.

Her mother was having none of that, and shoved him back into it. “You sit there, young man.” He crossed his arms. “Why didn’t you want to show him? What are you going to do, keep it hidden your whole life? How are you going to find your soulmate, then?”

He didn’t say anything, for once in his life, looking down to the floor with a frown. “Answer when I talk to you” she reprimanded him.

Jonny mumbled something under his breath. “Louder,” she said.

He looked up, anger fueling him once more. “I said that I don’t want a soulmate!”

They stared at each other, fury on both pair of eyes, until Jonny lowered his.

She then stepped forwards, grabbing his chin, forcing him to look at her. “You know what? Maybe you don’t deserve one. Maybe you should just keep hiding it, so _they_ will know how much of a selfish person you are.”

She kept her hold for a little more, while Jonny tried to keep the tears from falling. She then let go, walking towards the workshop. She would sew until it was night time, then make food for her husband and go to bed.

He just stayed there, in silence, fighting against tears that wanted out. He would not cry, he was a big boy. And it’s not like he had wanted a soulmate, anyway. He already knew that he wanted to be a pirate when he grew up, get away from this stupid place with some enormous ship, doing whatever he wanted, whenever he felt like it.

His father eventually came home, drunk and barely able to walk. He still had a bottle on his hand, and kept taking sips from it from time to time. It took him longer than it should to notice the kid in the room, still sat on the chair, black eye and broken lip.

“’D you win?” he asked, amused.

Jonny should have lied, said yes. Instead he shook his head without looking up.

All diversion fell from his face. He scoffed at him, and when to pass out on his room.

Death was common in the small town, but actual funerals were an event.

Officially, all dead bodies would receive a funeral, according to law. But, because the nature of the people that lived there, most of them were performed by the state, as there was no familiar (willing) to give the decease one.

Half of the town, including the Vangelis family, attended the Smith’s funeral.

He hadn’t wanted to go, and neither had Billy, but his mother insisted, and for all few thing she decided, when she got something in her head it actually got done.

Jonny had heard first about the deaths by his friends. They had been drinking in some alley, when Anne asked them if they’ve heard about the double suicide a couple of streets down. Most of them had, but she still told the rest what happened.

It had been the cleaning lady that found them lying on the bed, grabbing each other’s hand and a shotgun between them, no soul mark anymore but matching holes in the middle of their foreheads.

One single letter, too. Something about one not being able to live without their spouse, and the other not being able to live at all. That it had been a mutual decision.

Bullshit.

_(Jonny remembered when as kids they used to play chicken. Two child running in the same straight line, opposite directions. How one of them would be forced to move out of the way or both would crash in the worst scenario)_

There were rumors (there were always rumors about this sort of things, in this sort of town) that they had died with hours of difference, but noting official.

Jonny felt disgusted.

The feeling prevailed while they lowered the coffin to the ground. He took his chance when his mother turned around, and ran away.

Luckily, and because he was a very clever man, he had grabbed a hip flask before getting out of the house. Finding a deserted spot behind some dumps, he sat down and started emptying it.

There was somebody else there.

It was a girl, of his age or maybe older, and Jonny had the distinct feeling of having seen her before. She had a lighted tobacco between her lips, and he had the distinct sensation that if he said something she would grab a knife and stab him until death.

He gave head to her, and she got him off with her hand.

The next day, he remember where she knew her from. She was the only child of the diseased coupled, the only family to survive them. The state hadn’t bothered to check on her, as she had already reached eighteen, and seemed to be managing with the funeral just fine.

Jonny was the last person to see her, not that he told anybody. Not that anyone had asked. She just disappeared the morning after, and it was as if they had all been expecting it. The wildest rumors said that she had payed Joe from the old tattoo saloon to cover her mark before parting.

He wouldn’t have been surprised if they turned out to be true.

Jonny Vangelis had become an official magpie.

His mother would say that he never got over his pirate phase. He would shrug her off, and pierce his ear once more, looking carefully at his reflection as to not fuck up again and end up with two too close.

He had five holes on his left ear, and three on the other. It’s not that he had many earrings or studs to put on them, he only had a few he managed to steal from some ambulant merchant. No, but he tended to get bored of them, and so decide to move them from ear to ear, upper or lower.

His father said he would end up like a fucking strainer.

Last week he had tried to pierce his eyebrow, but he must have done something wrong, because he almost stabbed his eye, and had to stop when he couldn’t see shit for the blood falling on his eyes. It was still healing, but his mother had said that it would scar. Good.

Jack said that scars and pierces gave a face personality.

Billy, as Jack called him, had started taking Jonny with him to the local casino. He had said that it was high time to make a man out of him, shoved a cigarette into his mouth, and taught him to play cards. It turned out that he was quite good on the game, and managed to earn a few bills that he later spent in alcohol and shiny stuff.

Jack gave him a new, polished belt the first time he won a big game. From the house, he said, and Jonny started a new collection of belts and buckles.

His friends said that it made him look like an underweighted scarecrow.

He couldn’t care less.

They weren’t really his friends, anyway. Just fun people to hang out with. They would sometimes steal money from him when he passed out, and in return he would strip them from anything shiny when they did the same.

His favorite thing he had stolen was a black bandana with silver studs, courtesy of Michael. He had wrapped it around his wrist, under six other bracelets. It covered half his arm, and what was more important, his mark.

His mother had gone crazy when he saw it, but it didn’t matter. He smoked and had his own knife, he wasn’t a small boy anymore. He could do whatever the fuck he wanted.

His father couldn’t have cared less, just told him he looked like a fag with all those shines, and went to get drunk at some bar.

His friends had looked at him worriedly, and Michael tried to get it back. He punched everyone who annoyed him. He had become better at punching people.

Jack said that he looked as good as he was ever going to get, and asked him if he wanted to play a hand.

By the time he was sixteen, everybody knew Jonny Vangelis had blood on his hands.

The worst part had not been the killing itself. He could not remember doing it, smashing his fist against the other boy until his knuckles were red. Pushing him. Kicking him once he was on the ground.

He had gone to a party, because that was the only interesting thing to do in that godforsaken town, besides gambling. It had been dark, full of alcohol and without adult superstition, like all respectable parties. Also, as it was traditional, he was drunk like a fucking skunk.

His friends have been, too. Everybody was.

Including the boy. Jonny didn’t know his name, and had done his best to keep it that way. It seemed that it had been someone new to him, because he managed to do it easily.

All he knew of that night had come from collecting different version of the events, and tying them together into something believable. The kid (or guy, or man, or teen, depending on who you asked) had been as intoxicated as him, and had been bothering him for a good part of the night.

Everybody knew that you didn’t keep annoying Vangelis’ boy. He was like a bomb, liable to explode at any moment, unstable. Ended up hurting anyone around, especially himself.

He kept at it with him, about it. His mark. Kept asking why he hid it, if he thought himself better than the rest. Or if it was that there was nothing there, and didn’t want anyone to know. The last straw had been when he launched himself at Jonny, trying to rip his bandana off his arm.

A circle was formed around them, their friends watching, clapping, roaring. Nothing like a good fight to enhance a party.

To the person’s credit, he had given a good fight. The first reason why Jonny wasn’t as surprised as he should have when he was told he killed a man was because of the marks on his body. Nails scratching across his arms and face. Bruises everywhere. Two nails less on his right hand. A broken lip and some bald spots on his head.

His second clue was the state of his clothes. There was blood on them (it was not strange for a night out, but this was _too much_ ). The splash patterns on the tip of his boots, he noticed as he put them on to go to the kitchen and grab something to eat.

His mother was there, sitting on the kitchen table, gaze lost on nothing. When she heard him enter, she looked up at with a broken expression. That got him to freeze in the middle of the corridor (she barely glanced at him with any meaning anymore, other than to ask him to get something at the local market). When she shook her head and got out of the room without saying anything, he knew that whatever he had done, he had gone too far.

People looked at him different now. They kept their distance, and it took his friends a good week to go back to teasing him again. During that time, he had no idea of what happened, nor did he try to ask.

He found out at One Eyed Jack’s. Those days he stayed there much more frequently than before, but still not as often as his father. It turned out that when people were uneasy by your present, you could easily win their money away.

Jack had come to congratulate him on his winning streak, and gave him a gun. For the next one, he told him with a wink.

He kept it, and bought himself a holster with the money he got.

He is, like most days, completely drunk when he gets home that night. He had spent the night drinking with his friends, wasting his last cent in cheap whiskey and other dubious beverages.

That’s probably why he didn’t notice the music until it was too late, and he was already inside the kitchen.

His father, for once in his life, was more sober than Jonny. Still dressed in dirty clothes from doing whatever the fuck he did during the day, he was holding his mother on his arms, dancing slowly to the music of some old radio Jonny had never seen before.

She was radiant, with her hair free and swinging from one side to the other as the couple moved to the rhythm of the song. His mother was smiling, and looking at his husband as if she actually wanted to be on his arms. Her hands went up to his face, and they both stopped for a moment to kiss.

He had never seen his parents kiss, not like this. Not with them sober, and definitely not smiling.

Jonny turned around, and stomped the fuck out of the room.

Next morning, when he came back to grab something to eat, he found a plate of chicken and peas on the table, ice cold from the night before. He threw the food to the garbage bin.

He didn’t use the gun (hadn’t _shoot_ at anyone) until Jack asked him to. Well, order him was more accurate, because you didn’t say no to Jack, everybody knew. But he preferred to think that he was doing it of his own free will, a small luxury he could afford for the time being.

His first (second) one was easier than he expected. Three simple shoots on the chest, to make sure they stuck. Knock on the door, shoot, and close it again before leaving. He didn’t worry about witnesses (as if the whole town didn’t already know he was with Jack now) or evidence; he was untouchable.

The second (third) he almost ran away.

The woman had been expecting him, it seemed. She actually managed to get her gun out and shoot some bullets on his direction. He hid behind a table, waiting for her to run out of lead.

When he heard nothing for a while, he dared to look up from his hiding place. She was nowhere to be seen.

He walked the place, searching for the woman with his gun in hand, and a bullet on the chamber and ready to go out the second he heard something. Jonny found her on the floor, in a puddle of her own blood. Her last bullet had gone to her head.

It stroke something in him, he believes. Seeing her previously blond, now red hair sprawled all around her. And suddenly it wasn’t her face he was seeing. It was the face of a boy, a teen, with brown curls that were slowly turning into something black, and getting lost in between the dark grass around his head. Her eyes didn’t show a firm resolve anymore, but were open in a panicked expression, as if he couldn’t believe what was happening, as if he couldn’t understand what the red puddle was doing all around him.

Both of them looked at Jonny at the same time, and he threw up next to the body.

Jonny sat down for an hour, looking at what he had done, his mind flying in every direction, his hand firmly closed around the so heavy coloration on his wrist.

He had only been an annoyed boy, too noisy for his own good. Just curious about what he had under the bandana.

He hadn’t wanted to show him, he didn’t want to show it to anyone. It had been a long time since he himself had looked into it, and the memory of the shape was foggy on his mind. He wondered if it would still be the same. There were stories about people who changed so much, theirs changed with them. People coming back from war only to find that the partner waiting for them was not theirs anymore. Perhaps he would get it off and find nothing under.

He had stopped counting corpses after that.

He also stopped pretending this was all his choice. He wanted out.

That’s why he did it, he told himself. The price of his freedom. One last bullet, and he wouldn’t be indebted anymore. Jack himself had told him so.

But he hadn’t expected it to be that hard.

Jonny pulled the trigger nonetheless.

While Billy Vangelis bleed out, his son stood right above him, watching death slowly claim him. His breathing was becoming harder, and each blink was longer than the one before. His limbs slowly stopped trembling as the blood settled under him, and the mark on his arm was slowly fading away.

It was a wave, obviously.

Jonny couldn’t picture the man anywhere near water.

Marks were supposed to represent something dear to the couple, and it wasn’t unusual for them to be a mix of two different objects. Still, Vangelis’ was a simple, plane ocean wave. It made no sense.

His mother and he had moved here because he said he loved the dusty dessert, the wilderness of a place where no one asked the wrong questions (no one asked questions at all). He said he loved the way the sun stabbed your skin, the music of gunfire and betting pools.

It fit with what he knew of the man, the mark. No matter how much he claimed so, the proof was right there. The only passion his body knew about was stolen from his wife, and even that he had managed to remove from their lives.

Maybe that’s why she didn’t like to show her mark around. For shame at the reminder that there was no happiness in New Texas for them, that there never was. And she still knowingly had left her waves planets away to chase the promise of a story with a happy ending.

He couldn’t get his eyes away from him.

Jonny remembered what his mother had told him, many years ago now. That maybe he didn’t deserve a soulmate. That they didn’t deserve to have someone love him. Those hadn’t been her exact words, he supposed, but they were the ones that stuck.

He wondered how she would find out. Maybe it would be while she was sewing, or cooking. She would stretch her arm to reach for the salt, and the sleeve would rise up a little. She would think that she had dirt or something in there that she hadn’t noticed before, and try to wash it away. And when it didn’t come out, when she still wouldn’t see the mark there, she would scrub harder and harder, until she processed what that meant. What had happened.

If he was sorry for something, he told himself, it would be for snatching her mark away. He knew that most of her joys these days came from looking at it and remembering the ocean, the life she once had. Her smile, never as wide as when she told him about sharks and all those giants that lived underwater.

He wouldn’t die.

Why wouldn’t he just die?

He wanted to kick at him. Put another bullet, this time on the head. He had enough practice to have gotten rid of the ghost of the boy by now.

He couldn’t bring himself to move.

He sat down next to him.

That seemed to wake something on him. Billy took all the forces he had left and talked to his boy like he had never done.

Jonny sat there a moment more after he died.

He wondered if it had been enough now. Enough deaths, enough heartbreaks to change the figure on his wrist. If he had already lost what had been promised to him, the only thing he had granted.

 _You don’t deserve a soulmate_ , she said in a whisper inside his head.

For the first time in years, he got his bandana and looked at the skin under it.

What he saw finally managed to finish breaking his already expiring heart.

**Author's Note:**

> Should I rewrite this? Probably. Do I have the time? *looks at calendar and cries*
> 
> So, one thing that I wanted to say is that i didnt write jonny to be aro (in this fic) (i actually have plans for aro people in the verse that are yet to come), but instead go like, the preassures of people for finding a partner, and how it would start sooner here cause soulmarks.
> 
> Did I aim too high for something I had to publish on the same day? Yes, yes I did. Do I regreat it? *laughs*


End file.
